Register an account now to get access to all board features. After you've registered and logged in, you'll be able to create topics, post replies, send and receive private messages, disable the viewing of ads and more!

The Serious Sam Thread
"In anticipation for SS4"

Serious Sam HD Gold and SS3 was sold in retail here so that's how I bought my copies. It's nice to have them on the shelf. When those games were a thing retail was still pretty popular around here so even smaller publishers liked to release their games in that format, chances are things will be different with SS4 sadly.

These days you gotta be grateful if any publisher still releases retail boxes. The upcoming Ion Maiden release is a fine example and will probably make me buy it even though I already own a digital copy and will most likely never need anything else. However, that floppy disk USB stick is too cool to skip.

These days you gotta be grateful if any publisher still releases retail boxes. The upcoming Ion Maiden release is a fine example and will probably make me buy it even though I already own a digital copy and will most likely never need anything else. However, that floppy disk USB stick is too cool to skip.

Yep, I hope I can get my hands on IM's physical release but honestly I'm a bit worried after seeing how lame 3DR is when it comes to even small things like updating the game on their own store.

When it comes to Serious Sam 4 I think our best bet of getting a retail copy would be Poland or Croatia.

False equivalency much? What about vinyl? The market for vinyl records has gone way up since digital distribution of music "took over". There are some conveniences in technology that we're willing to accept and others that we're not. I don't believe everybody is going to give everything up to "the cloud". People still want to own physical media. Collector's editions with feelies for console games are as popular now as the PC equivalents used to be.

False equivalency much? What about vinyl? The market for vinyl records has gone way up since digital distribution of music "took over". There are some conveniences in technology that we're willing to accept and others that we're not. I don't believe everybody is going to give everything up to "the cloud". People still want to own physical media. Collector's editions with feelies for console games are as popular now as the PC equivalents used to be.

But that's not the traditional retail market and if you take stuff like vinyl for example that has some added value: vinyl sounds different so listening to an album on vinyl is a unique experience fueled by that distinct, nostalgic feeling of hearing the result of two "physical things" interacting with each other.

A video game is just a collection of data, how that data is stored doesn't matter when it comes to the player experience. Because of this the main problem is that a boxed copy of a game is essentially useless, especially nowadays where most people don't even have a DVD drive in their PCs anymore. It's weird that when I buy a game in retail these days I don't even use the disc, I just log onto Steam, input the code and start downloading.

Boxed copies have a future but only as collector items and if you think about it that's just not the real thing.

It does matter how it's stored if it involves being stored somewhere where someday you may not have access to it at the whim of some distributor or, far worst-case scenario, a lawsuit of some kind. The idea is that you own a copy yourself that nothing can take away short of seizing your physical assets. This is why GOG is as popular as it is. Because it's DRM-free. This is why sites like limitedruns.com have a big enough audience to sustain a business model.

I just don't buy any more that digital distribution is the foregone conclusion and we're all just waiting for physical media to phase out completely. There are attributes to physical media that digital distribution just doesn't have. I think people are starting to see that. I could be wrong, but that's the way that I see it. I think the one of the only reasons why we don't still have a popular physical media market for PC games is because we don't have a physical medium large enough to contain all the data. This is why consoles are still around. I know some console games require further online downloading, but when it all comes down to it buying a console game means you have the game and can play it at any time without the internet. The recent 25th Anniversary Myst Kickstarter made over 300% of its goal. Yes, the cool LED linking panel Myst book was a factor, but it comes with all the games on disc. It matters and it is a factor.

Oh, I wanted to post a video here but I failed to find it until now. This deals with the history behind the development of SS3 during the murky years between SS2 and the game's release where Croteam was actually working on a tech presentation, basically a pitch for Doom 4:

So if you wanted to know why SS3 has a lot of enemies that look like Doom monsters... it's because they ARE Doom monsters.

When I first saw a rumor that SS4 would be open world, I thought it was a dumb idea.
The more I thought about it, the more an open world Serious Sam could be really cool, if done right. The first few levels of Second Offense come to mind, especially Valley of the Jaguars (name?) where theres a giant open area with several tight corridor sections splitting off from it and everytime you go into one and come out, bigger and badder enemies await you in the main hub.
Something like this but greatly expanded could be a good fun game, especially if the main big hub changes drastically several times.
Hearing its more linear but still wide open is still cool to read; a traditional linear Sam game is also more than welcome.

The thing is though that music streaming services are becoming more popular every year. That doesn't mean that more traditional distribution modes will disappear; there's no reason the two can't coexist. I can't see music streaming ever disappearing.

MusicallyInspired, on 25 April 2018 - 11:48 AM, said:

It does matter how it's stored if it involves being stored somewhere where someday you may not have access to it at the whim of some distributor or, far worst-case scenario, a lawsuit of some kind. The idea is that you own a copy yourself that nothing can take away short of seizing your physical assets. This is why GOG is as popular as it is. Because it's DRM-free. This is why sites like limitedruns.com have a big enough audience to sustain a business model.

So what are you talking about exactly? Digital distribution, where you download your goods online as opposed to a physical transfer, or systems where you stream content or otherwise have your content locked to an account like steam?

Finished SS3 on serious difficulty on Fusion just the other day and there are some things I didn't like about it but man, overall it's still an excellent game.

A lot of people shit on the game's pacing because at first it really doesn't feel like a Sam game: the enemy numbers are just not there, the level design feels like a middle ground between Sam and Duke 3D with all the realism and the bit more complex layouts etc. but in the grand scheme of things I think it works wonderfully. SS3 has this gradual build up and because the first half of the game is conservative with the enemy numbers the second half's large battles can surprise you. It also provides a wonderful bit of "environmental storytelling" with how the game starts you off in a city with Sam and a bunch of other characters and how gradually everybody and literally every sign of modern civilization disappears, leaving Sam alone to witness the Apocalypse. You're playing this cheesy game with the badass protagonist but by the end you do feel like you're the last man on Earth and in the back of your head you're like "wow, this was the last day of humanity".

Fusion's new additions took some getting used to but overall they made the game more interesting, I liked the new secondary attacks the enemies have here. Croteam optimized the game's performance a lot too, I never dipped below 60 fps on ultra settings and that's wonderful compared to the original game. SS3 could be a bit too much for DX9 and a single CPU thread but those issues are non-existent now, I saw a comparison benchmark and in some places they managed to double the framerate on identical settings.

There are a few things I found bad though and while Fusion improves on some of that I don't think it will be able to remedy design decisions that are just bad. First: the underground levels are super boring and they are not fun to play. At those parts you get a flashlight to view dark areas but your view distance is still limited so exploration doesn't feel right + Croteam slows down your movement speed guess because you're supposed to take in the "atmosphere". Bad idea and the special enemy type you encounter underground, the creatures Sam calls "space monkeys" are boring to fight against.

Second: even though Fusion makes hitscan enemies more bearable by making them less accurate if you're moving overall there are still just too many of them. It's not fun to shoot 50 of those hard to spot black soldiers because the fact that you have to creep around corners really slows everything down. Hitscan has a place in Serious Sam but the yellow and red scorpions were perfectly enough and balanced, instead of that duo you still get the red ones but the yellow ones are nowhere to be seen and replaced by a smaller, weaker variant. Why? Because if there is a weaker scorpion then the game can throw a lot more of them at you = more hitscan on top of the new black soldiers. Fuck that, when those two are around in great numbers you have a ruined combat encounter.

I don't get the witch brides either: they work as this interesting yet mildly annoying enemy type when you only have to face one at a time but on the last level you're attacked by at least 6 of them at once (while around two dozen small hitscan scorpions are on your ass... yeah, it's absolutely the worst part of the game). That shit just doesn't work, Croteam!

Duke dyed his hair and changed his shirt. But wasn't that the point of the whole series, anyway?

That's what I thought from the first moment I saw this in a Radio Shack on a jewel case swivel-stand and wrote it off as a worthless clone trying to capitalize on the Duke image back in the day. Wish I had given it a chance then.

I will say that I'm not into stuff like Painkiller and Hard Reset, but Serious Sam seems different. It's not always the horde waves. The aforementioned games are so blatantly like that and with their much smaller scale of levels it's even more noticeable.

According to a Croatian article Sam 4 will feature scenes where 100.000 characters are present on screen thanks to new tech called the Legion System, the maps will be freakin' huge and you can use the bike shown in the trailer for getting around the environment quickly:https://translate.go...esivan/7464270/

That's great for tech demo stuff, but it doesn't sound like anything I'd want to actually play. The series may be famous for its massive mob crowds, but you don't need to take it over the top like that. Good to know that it's possible in theory, though.

The talent of the game designer lies in taking a mechanic like that and making it fun somehow. Serious Sam isn't just a mindless crowd shooter. They've always seemed to keep things interesting. I'm optimistic that they can find a way to make it make sense and not just be that many enemies at once for the sake of it.